GND ruins business confidence, businesses will fight back against regulations threatening profit, no matter long-term consequences

Capitalists keep a firm grip on the state in at least two ways. First, they place their people into state positions, and influence other state officials through social ties, donations, and the lure of lucrative work after leaving office. Second, they threaten and carry out “capital strikes.” Whenever state managers adopt policies that slow or impede the flow of private profit, capitalists threaten to stop investing. When they do stop the flow of capital, the investors’ aim is to “” to tank popular support for progressive governments.

The fight for a GND will have to overcome these powers over the state, wielded by some of the most dangerously mighty corporations in history. For a measure of the Goliaths we’re up against, consider that ExxonMobil, the largest fossil fuel company in the US, had $237 billion in revenue in 2017. This wealth means power over our economy, and an enormous influence over our political system.

These companies won’t ever give up on selling the vast reserves they’re sitting on — US reserves alone were worth an estimated  in 2014 — but many other sectors of capital are not as closely tied to fossil fuels. Though no industry is fully disconnected from oil, gas, and coal, it is easy to imagine how capitalists heavily invested in telecom or pharmaceutical companies might allow a GND far sooner than the board members at Exxon. The cleavage in the old New Deal was between capital- and labor-intensive sectors of capital. The potential cleavage for a GND will likely be between carbon-intensive and low-carbon sectors.

Large industries that currently rely heavily on fossil fuels, like logistics, agriculture, or construction would be seriously disrupted by the transition to a clean energy economy. Non-fossil fuel capitalists would also be hurt by a GND: a jobs guarantee would cost them much of their power to manipulate workers with the threat of unemployment, most would pay higher taxes, and all would lose some of their control over the economy. But the transition for these sectors would be made possible by the enormous public investment and innovation unleashed by the GND, and in the medium term they would gain huge savings through publicly provided energy, transit, housing, and more. And in the long term, of course, these firms and their investors would benefit enormously by averting the most catastrophic climate disasters, which will otherwise increasingly threaten massive investments in fixed capital such as logistics infrastructure and real estate.

Nevertheless, all firms are oriented to short-term profits, and the climate obstruction of the billionaire-funded Democratic Party leadership proves that all sectors of the corporate class are willing to accept catastrophic climate change if it means protecting their power over the economy. If powerful capitalists will not push the government to adopt the GND, that leaves only one force that has both the interest in a socially just green transformation and the social power to see it through: an organized and militant working-class movement.